The world isn’t going to end today. Sorry to disappoint you

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It’s hard to know for certain, but if you’re reading this, the world probably hasn’t ended.

The doomsday brouhaha of December 21, 2012, was fuelled by the Long Count Calendar of the ancient Maya, the most complicated ever devised. It splits time into 13 “baktuns”, each of which contains 144,000 days. The 13th baktun ended today, completing a 5,000-year cycle and spawning an epidemic of apocalyptic predictions. There was, however, one important group who never believed that the end of the calendar would mark The End: the Maya themselves.

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In Kiev, activists from the Internet party of Ukraine, in suitably extraterrestrial costume, handed out survival kits including matches, salt, soap and condoms

December 21 2012 Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA

In Kiev, activists from the Internet party of Ukraine, in suitably extraterrestrial costume, handed out survival kits including matches, salt, soap and condoms